[The Soup Nazi]

Paul Krugman's NYT newsletter, July 14. He absolutely nails it in the paragraph I put in bold:

A plague of petty grievances

The great re-closing has begun. California is entering a de facto second lockdown. Many southern states, which actually have worse outbreaks than California, should be doing the same, although it seems all too likely that Republican governors will, true to form, wait too long to take effective actions. Nonetheless, it’s now clear that the rush to resume normal life was an act of immense folly, for which we will pay a heavy price in both lives and money.

In today’s column, I emphasized, in particular, the folly of permitting large gatherings and opening bars. This was in part, I have to admit, because I liked the rhetorical device of suggesting that we compromised our children’s future so we could go out drinking. But it’s also true that drinking in groups, a situation in which people naturally become loud and boisterous, has to be among the activities most likely to fuel a pandemic spread by airborne droplets.

It occurs to me, however, that some readers might think that I have a problem with the idea of people having fun, or that I think we got into this mess because people wanted to have a good time. I plead not guilty on both counts.

There may be an element of censoriousness in some critiques of reopening; enough with the photos of crowded beaches! But Puritanism, which H.L. Mencken famously described as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” wasn’t a major factor in the alarm I and others felt as we barreled toward our current crisis.

And for what it’s worth, while bars aren’t my thing, indie music concerts — lots of people standing in a small space, beers in hand while the performers and sometimes the audience sing — are. Today’s music selection is a video I shot eight months, and an eternity, ago.

Nor do I believe that the natural human desire for a good time is what got us into our current crisis.

People are people, and can’t be expected to behave with inhuman self-restraint. Anyone who imagines that we can reopen colleges and expect undergraduates to practice social distancing has forgotten what it was like to be 19.

But fun-loving young people didn’t drive the disastrous March/April push to LIBERATE (as Donald Trump put it) states under lockdown. Much of that push, instead, came from the top down — from Trump and his allies who wanted to goose the stock market, from business interests who wanted to bring back lost profits.

And the psychology behind grass roots opposition to social distancing — behind all those people raging against being required to wear a face mask — doesn’t have much if anything to do with a desire to enjoy life.

What it reflects, instead — or at least that’s what I believe — is a pervasive resentment among some Americans at the idea that they might be asked to bear any burden, even a small inconvenience, for the sake of others. In fact, the small inconveniences seem to provoke the biggest displays of rage.

I first noticed this phenomenon decades ago, when I was living in Massachusetts and saw how a local talk radio host whipped up rage against the state’s mandatory seatbelt law. (The law was reinstated after a surge in deaths.) I’ve seen it on environmental issues, with right-wing pundits suggesting violent action against local officials over things like the ban on phosphates in detergents — hey, this was meant to prevent toxic algal blooms, but possibly means that your dishwasher doesn’t work quite as well.

In other words, the problem isn’t people who want to enjoy themselves, it’s people who act out their petty grievances — encouraged and empowered by the pettiest, most grievance-filled man ever to occupy the White House. And in the face of a pandemic, pettiness can be lethal.


Quick Hits

How New York and its governor, after a bad start, rose to the occasion.

Arizona’s governor didn’t, and the public has noticed.

The president doesn’t need experts, he can listen to game show hosts.

Of course Stephen Moore is leading the smear campaign against Anthony Fauci.


Facing the Music

I shot this on my phone at Rockwood Music Hall last November — without magnification. (I got a friend to hold my beer.) How long it will be before we can have experiences like this again?